In the post about my development workflow I didn’t explain why I decided to track the entire website instead of just parts of it. Since I’m not doing any development of the WordPress core itself, the option exists to just track my own plugins and themes by creating a new git repository in their directories. […]

After getting my server environment set up I needed to come up with a plan for getting the code off of my live site and on my development box. In addition, I want to be able to track the changes I make so I know what needs to be uploaded back to the server, and so […]

This is just a quick recommendation for two servers that you might find useful in your development environment. Acrylic DNS Proxy Acrylic is a caching DNS proxy. You tell it where your real DNS servers are (provided by your ISP) and it will contact them when you need to look up an internet address. Then […]

I haven’t made it to discussing what tool I want to edit code in yet. That’s no excuse for not going ahead and promoting Notepad++ though. Whether you prefer a full integrated development environment (IDE) or a simple text editor you should have Notepad++ on hand. You’ll be editing configuration files from time to time […]

The first requirement I mentioned in the intro seems obvious enough. I need “a web server that can run PHP and WordPress and has the ability to serve multiple sites so that I can work on multiple projects.” Fortunately, this easy enough to do on Windows 2008 Server by downloading an Apache web server distribution called XAMPP. […]

So far I’ve been making changes and tweaks directly to my live site. I’ve added themes and plugins, and the few times I’ve modified code I did so in cPanel’s built in editor. That’s worked fine for minor changes but if I’m going to be changing code and adding plugins that’s a terrible setup. I’m […]

My latest diversion. The code at this link adds a new meta box on the Appearance>Menu screen. The defaults are Page, Custom, and Category. This particular one adds a divider type. It doesn’t have any code beyond getting the meta box to show. There is a plugin that adds a custom menu item called Dynamic […]

Update: The image I assigned as the default one in the Default Featured Image plugin wasn’t big enough. After looking through the code I noticed Jetpack requires the image to be at least 200 x 200. This is surely documented somewhere but I missed it. You can always test your posts by plugging the URL […]

I wanted to see how WordPress stored its menus. I assumed there must be a table in the database somewhere but I couldn’t find it. Turns out that’s because menu items are stored as posts with a ‘nav_menu_item’ post type. In all there where about 4 or 5 tables the information was spread over. I […]

Well this explains why page load times went to 30 seconds here earlier. And here I thought maybe I had finally added one too many plugins. Given the scope of the attack (100Gbps and a new technique) it is fairly impressive they dealt with it in 3 hours. The official response from management below. Source: […]